Blog of economic justice campaigner Sabita Banerji

Author: Sabita Banerji

Did you know that the name ‘Tesco’ is a combination of the names of Jack COhen, the supermarket’s founder, and T.E.Stockwell who supplied him with tea?

Jack – aka “Slasher” Cohen – had an eye for an opportunity. At the end of the Great War he used his demob money from the Royal Flying Corp to buy army surplus food, and sold it to hungry, impoverished, war-weary Londoners on an East End market stall. He made a £1 profit on £4 of sales that day. This year, Tesco made £1,644 million profit on £51 billion of sales. Clever chap!

Tea, provided by Mr Stockewell, was Tesco’s first own-brand product, and recently – with discounters Aldi and Lidl snapping at its heels – it has come a full circle and started stocking Stockwell tea again.

And it’s marvellous value. Only 50p for a pack of 80 tea bags! How do they do it?!

No, seriously. How DO they manage to sell a product that’s plucked laboriously by hand, (on tea estates that have to house, feed, educate and provide healthcare for each worker’s entire family), that’s processed in vast factories, transported thousands of miles from India, Africa, Sri Lanka and other far flung countries (the pack doesn’t specify), packed in tea bags that are packed in boxes, that are transported to warehouses and thence to stores where people are paid to put them on shelves and sell them?

In May 2018 the average price of a kilo of tea from the Mombassa tea auction (one of the two main sources of the tea we drink – the other is the Kolkatta auction) was £1.82. So they paid about 36 pence for the 200g of tea that’s in the Stockwell box of 80 – leaving 14 pence for all the rest.

And to cover the profit margins of the tea producers, traders, transporters, packers, branders, advertisers, and retailers along the way.

In India, for example, workers are not even paid the national minimum wage. Their employers say they are hamstrung by the Plantation Labour Act regulations that compel them to support not just the workers, but also their families. This can mean that for a plantation with 1,000 workers, the tea company has to provide for, say, 6,000 people (counting children and elderly relatives). So they include these benefits in the wage calculation.

So maybe Tesco is taking the hit – sacrificing profit on a “loss-leader” to lure customers away from the siren call of the German discounters. But even if that’s the case, it leaves the entire supply chain impoverished. And with its new “strategic alliance” with French retail giant Carrefour, Tesco is promising even lower prices…

Can you blame them? Tesco topped Oxfam’s Supermarket Scorecard launched last month as part of its Behind the Barcodes campaign on public policies that protect workers’ and farmers’rights – but how long can it keep that up when it’s fighting pernicious price wars?

Sainsburys got into hot water last year for publicly moving from Fairtrade tea to its own “fairly traded” model (which campaigners criticised for disempowering growers) – but have you noticed that it’s much harder to find Fairtrade products in Tesco now too? At least its Stockwell tea is Rainforest Alliance certified…

It seems that the tea supply chain shackles and traps everyone in it in some way. From producers shackled by low prices and thousands of dependants, to retailers caught in a vicious, ‘race-to-the-bottom’ price war.

But someone, somewhere, must be making good money from the vast trade in the world’s second most popular drink after water.

And none are so shackled, so impoverished, so disempowered and so much in need of your support as the workers who picked the tea in your 0.006 pence tea bag.

What can you do? Well, for a start you can “use your consumer power” and contact your supermarket as Oxfam suggests. You can also do as Traidcraft suggests and ask the big British tea brands Who Picked My Tea?

On February 26th, while Oxfam and the wider aid sector slipped mercifully out of the headlines and knuckled down to the long haul of exorcising their demons and rebuilding the trust of their supporters, Fairtrade Fortnight began.

For those who have suffered at the hands of powerful men and have finally felt heard, and for all women, I hope this leads to redress and to greater safety and respect at work.

For those who believe everything they see in the media, it will be a break from the sense of shock and betrayal at the relentless onslaught of revelations of misconduct in a sector that exists to end suffering, not to create it.

And for those who know (most of) the complex, messy truth behind the media headlines, it will be a break from the sense of being under a sustained and deliberate attack (even if a small part of it may be justified).

So why should we care about Fairtrade Fortnight? Compared to these horribly serious issues, what’s so important about a cheery logo on a chocolate bar or a pack of teabags?

Because, my friends, it’s all about power.

Men who sexually harass or take advantage of women in any sector are abusing positions of power. And as affluent consumers we wield far more power than we perhaps realise. But we’re not affluent, I hear you cry. Yes we are – we may not be billionaires like those mentioned in Oxfam’s inequality report – but compared to the legions who produce our food, we really are.

And every time we go grocery shopping we have the power to make a choice. A choice that will directly impact on the women and men – and sometimes children – who produced the food we’re buying.

I don’t make this comparison lightly. Poverty, too, is a form of abuse.

Extreme poverty makes women and men vulnerable to harassment and humiliation every day of their lives, often with no escape and no hope of redress.

Poverty – and the powerlessness that goes with it – means having to work long, back-breaking hours, having to choose to send your child to work rather than school. It means not being able to afford treatment when you or your child is sick, or getting trapped into debt to pay for it.

It means being vulnerable to abuse – including sexual abuse – every day; abuse from those with the power to directly buy your products, to set the price for them, to give you work on their farms, and to supervise that work. And the power to lend you money when you or your child is sick.

And much of the food we buy is grown and processed by women and men in extreme poverty. Fairtrade certified food less so. It’s as simple as that.

The Fairtrade Foundation has put together a powerful short film challenging us to think how we would react if the inequality and exploitation in our food supply chains were up close and personal. It shows weary African children delivering food to nice, middle class homes. The homeowners are horrified and berate the children’s supervisor, who replies cheerily that “If you want low, low prices, this is part of the price”.

Think about it. When you can buy 45 teabags for 25 pence what impact do you think that has on the industry that produces the tea? Or the wages tea producers can afford to pay their workers, or their ability to provide decent housing, healthcare and sanitation?

Study after study has shown that Fairtrade certified farmers are usually better off, and have more say in what they earn and in how profits are spent. A study by the ODI, for example, claims “The evidence clearly indicates that certified producers have benefited from higher prices through Fairtrade certified sales, during periods of low conventional market prices.”

As Sandra Joseph, a banana farmer in the Winward Islands so powerfully put it, “Without the intervention of Fairtrade we would be fighting a losing battle. Fairtrade is our last best chance, our choice, our future… bananas are finished without Fairtrade.”

In the spirit of transparency, I must tell you that this is not the full picture. Fairtrade is not perfect. There are some circumstances, in the exponential complexity of this global trading system that we are all caught in, where Fairtrade has failed so far to lift the poorest out of poverty.

Nevertheless, I am a strong believer in the idea that offering farmers a stable price, access to markets, technical support and a premium to spend on the community has to be better on the whole than leaving them defenceless to the ferocity of global market forces.

And I do believe that Fairtrade can and has helped to even up the power imbalance a little (and sometimes a lot) so that thousands of women and men could escape extreme poverty and live more dignified, empowered lives. (Incidentally, Fairtrade was founded in 1992 by a group of organisations, including Oxfam.)

This year’s Fairtrade Fortnight message is “With Fairtrade we have the power to change the world every day”.

Oxfam is under attack. Some would say rightly so. It allowed sexual predators to be employed – repeatedly – in situations in which women were vulnerable to their power and abuse. And that was absolutely wrong.

When that happened – seven years ago – it launched an investigation, got rid of the perpetrators, issued a press release, informed the Charity Commission and its donors, and then put in place stronger safeguarding measures and channels for people to be able to report abuses. And that was mostly right.

In the middle of managing that huge and complex natural disaster response it had to make some tough decisions – it didn’t report it to the local police, or go into the full details of the misconduct in its public reports – and I don’t know, maybe that was partly or wholly wrong.

The safeguarding system it put in place was starting to work – allowing more cases of abuse to emerge. The safeguarding team asked for more resources and, although not immediately, they were ultimately boosted – and that was a wrong that was at least partially put right.

In January, Oxfam launched a report called “Reward Work, Not Wealth: To end the inequality crisis, we must build an economy for ordinary working people, not the rich and powerful.” And that, in my view is right, but it attracted the ire of some of the rich and powerful.

On Friday Feb 9th (the day that Jacob Rees Mogg presented a Daily Express petition to Downing Street against foreign aid) The Times published the story of the sexual misconduct story from seven years earlier.

Oxfam has apologised repeatedly and sincerely for its mistakes. It has committed to putting in place even stronger safeguarding measures, being even more transparent, working with other aid agencies to make it even more difficult for sexual predators to move between agencies. And that is absolutely right.

But what is so heartbreaking is that the whole of this amazing organisation is being tarred with the same brush, a brush charged with half-truths and vested interests. My colleagues are being attacked and abused, accused of vanity, arrogance, greed, selfishness… and that is so, so wrong.

The Oxfam I know is an organisation that is deeply committed not just to ending the hunger and suffering of millions of people around the world, but finding out – through painstaking research – why they are hungry and suffering and doing something about that too.

The Oxfam I know is a collection of incredibly committed, unbelievably hardworking, thoughtful people who do not by any means see themselves as saints or put themselves on a pedestal above others, but who are simply responding to a strong sense of injustice in the world. As the Guardian journalist who visited Oxfam recently reported, they are heartbroken, angry, distraught – one colleague who has dedicated over 30 years of her life to the organisation described it feeling like “a bereavement.”

The Oxfam I know provided food and medical care to thousands of refugees from the newly formed Bangladesh through my grandparents’ Social Welfare Society in West Bengal.

The Oxfam I know brought doctors to a remote forest in central India to treat tribal people who had no access to medical care – including the man who told me his harrowing story of an infected leg that stopped him from being able to earn his living as a farmer, of going from hospital to hospital but being unable to pay for the treatment he needed, and of being ready to give up and die, before Oxfam provided the treatment he needed and literally saved his life.

The Oxfam I know responds immediately and pragmatically to disasters, like the 2004 Tsunami, when I helped in the communication hub and heard the reports coming in from all the affected countries about the food, housing, water, sanitation, clothing, medicines being rushed in.

The Oxfam I know enables incredible individuals – Indian, South African, Malawian, Bosnian, Zimbabwean, Zambian, Filipino, Haitian etc colleagues – to dedicate their lives to helping the people of their own countries.

The Oxfam I know consists of women and men who repeatedly fly into the most dangerous situations in the world, leaving behind the comfort and safety of their homes and their families to work day and night to help fellow human beings survive wars, earthquakes, volcanoes, epidemics… without abusing sex workers.

And all that is so, so right.

If you – like me – still believe in Oxfam and its work, please send a much needed message of support. And go into an Oxfam shop to hug a volunteer. (It’s ok – there are strong safeguarding measures in place there too.)

“On this 70th International Human Rights day, I am sitting with a nice, hot cup of tea, looking out at the snow falling, as if on cue, just in time for me and my daughter (who gave me the flattering mug!) to get in the Christmas mood and start putting up the decorations.

Thousands of miles away, by contrast, the people who grew the tea I’m drinking face blistering hot sun, carrying back-breaking loads of tea (they’re paid by weight), and the danger of meeting wild elephants on the way back to their two-room huts… That’s why a group in Assam is calling on us to observe Human Rights Day as *Tea Workers Rights Day*.

Moments later, Facebook, doubtless having detected a whiff of altruism in my post, suggested that I might like to add a ‘donate’ button to my post to raise money for my “charity”.

But that’s the awful irony – why should workers in a multi-million pound global industry, producing the second most popular drink in the world after water, including brands that are named and prized for their distinctive quality – Assam, Darjeeling, Ceylon – be in need of charity? Or, indeed, in need of food rations from their employers?

This industry, which is predicated on cheap and plentiful manual labour, and on low, low prices – restricting the ability of those employers to pay decent wages – needs a jolly good shake up.

And it starts with you making that toast.

I mean the toast to tea workers rights, not the toast you made to go with the tea.

“By introducing properly prepared mascons to the brain, one can mask any object in the outside world behind a fictitious image—superimposed—and with such dexterity, that the psychemasconated subject cannot tell which of his perceptions have been altered, and which have not. If but for a single instant you could see this world of ours the way it really is—undoctored, unadulterated, uncensored—you would drop in your tracks!”

This is a passage from an extraordinary book I read as a teenager called The Futurological Congress. I have since been haunted by the image it portrays of a world in which people have the impression that they are blissfully happy and have all the comforts of life, delicious food, comfortable homes, beautiful clothes. But the reality – which the hero is able to see after taking a dose of up’n’at’m, the antidote to mascon – is that they are dressed in rags, eating gruel from troughs and clambering up empty lift shafts (the hero always wondered why people were so out of breath when they came out of the lift…).

Tonight I saw a film called ‘Machines’ by Rahul Jain. It is the cinematic equivalent of up’n’at’m. It is not the first film to strip away the illusion of the seductive images of life that advertising constantly sleets into our consciousness, to reveal the mind-numbing drudgery, brutality and ugliness of cheap labour production. But it is one of the most powerful I have seen.

It absolutely made me drop in my tracks.

The only music is the ceaseless thrumming of the machines (the mechanical ones). Human “machines” silently tend the mechanical ones – stoking their fiery throats, oiling their antediluvian limbs, feeding endless rivers of pure white or brightly coloured fabric through their roaring rollers, heaving vats of the dark and poisonous dye or the giant bales of intricately patterned voille that it miraculously transforms into. (One of the most striking things about Jain’s film is how beautiful he makes the ugliness of industrial dirt and poverty.)

The only voice is when – very occasionally – the workers speak. Several – with quiet resignation – speak of their 12 hour shifts and their inability to educate their children on their pitiful pay. One (literally looking over his shoulder) about the fear of unionising, another of the futility of attempting to do so.

A young boy – of roughly GCSE age – describes how every day when he arrives at the factory gates his gut tells him to turn round and run away… but he has no choice but to go in to start his 12 hour shift. (Later, we see another boy his age repeatedly nodding off and almost toppling into the machine he is monotonously tending.) He has swallowed the line he’s been fed that by starting young he’ll learn valuable skills. But the adults reveal that this is no life to aspire to. It is a life that they have no choice but to accept due to their poverty.

Another worker says that all he knows is his room and the area of the factory where he works solidly from the time he wakes to the time he sleeps – he has never set eyes on the factory owner, has no idea who he is or what he looks like.

The next image is of said factory owner, predictably plump and well-to-do, who seems to know the workers a lot better than they know him. He explains the importance of keeping the workers a little hungry because if they get too comfortable they will tell the company to “fuck off”. He also explains that 50% of the workers do not care about their families and if he paid them more they would just spend it on alcohol and tobacco.

One man denies that this is exploitation, because he has chosen – even got into debt – to come from hundreds of miles away to work here. And is grateful for it. “Poverty is harassment.” he explains. And adds, with the universal fatalism of the poor the world over, “There is no cure.”

But he is wrong. There is a cure.

The cure is workers uniting and demanding their internationally agreed rights (even the suitably villainous looking contractor knows that it is the disunity of the workers – migrants from other impoverished parts of India – that makes them vulnerable).

The cure is the government enforcing its laws on child labour, health and safety, working hours and minimum pay.

The cure is us – you – the consumer making it known loud and clear that yes we are always happy to find a bargain, but not at the cost of turning men into machines.

Jain (unseen and unheard by us) is confronted by the workers at one point. Because we dont see him, they are, in effect, confronting us. They accuse him (us) of being just like all the others – like the politicians coming and hearing their tragic story and then going away and doing nothing about it. “Help us get 8 hour shifts instead of 12,” he says. “Tell us what to do and we’ll do it – won’t we, brothers?” His co-workers punch the air and shout their assent.

They are the cure.

Assuming they are not sacked for unionising (there are plenty more poor to take their place), and their fledgling leader doesn’t mysteriously disappear…

Jain does his bit to support them by showing us his film. Now what can we do to support them?

Pembilla Orumai demonstrators in Munnar, September 2015. The poster of MM Mani in the background was torn down minutes later. Image: Sabita Banerji 2015

Breaking news…scientists have decoded the genetic building blocks of the tea plant! This, according to the BBC, “could lead to ways to improve the quality and price of tea”! Hoorah for the wonders of 21st century technology…!

Meanwhile, in the same week, the primitive horrors of the early 20th century are being replayed on an Indian tea plantation, where 19th century working conditions have largely been preserved; The Hindu depicts a woman on hunger strike calling for political change being forcibly hospitalised, her hair dishevelled, what looks like blood on her legs, humiliatingly exposed when her sari rides up during her unceremonious manhandling.

Thus Gomathy, one of the original leaders of the 2015 protest by Pembilla Orumai against poor pay and working conditions in Munnar, Kerala, relives the treatment of suffragettes like Marion Wallace Dunlop in 1909. Originally an informal, grassroots organisation, Pembilla Orumai (meaning Unity of Women) was established last year as a formal trade union and aligned with the centrist Aam Admi party.

Gomathy, along with Kasualya and Rajeswary , was fasting to demand the resignation of M.M. Mani, a minister in the Kerala State government for implying that during the 2015 strike there had been improper goings on in the forests. A silly, childish accusation, but one designed to trivialise an historic – and heroic – act by a group of women workers standing up against patriarchy. Not only the patriarchy of their employers, but also of male-dominated trade unions and of politicians like Mani whose billboard poster I witnessed being torn down during the protest. The Wire, reporting on the incident last week suggests that “For the misogynistic male audience of Kerala, Mani had the perfect words to enthral the masses.”

Although universal suffrage may seem a greater or more important cause to fast for than an apology for a schoolboy insult, in effect Gomathy and her colleagues too were protesting the contemptuous dismissal of women as a political force. The hunger striking suffragettes were demanding to be treated as political prisoners rather than petty criminals when imprisoned for acts of politically motivated “vandalism”. Gomathy and her fellow hunger strikers were also demanding to be treated with respect and dignity. To be taken seriously.

The most famous of hunger strikers was of course Mahatma Gandhi. Although in later years he fasted for great causes like opposition to the proposed separate political representation for dalit castes, interestingly his first politically motivated fast was in 1918 in support of textile workers in Ahmedabad striking for a pay rise.

The Munnar authorities claim that the forcible hospitalisation of Gomathy and her fellow hunger strikers was necessary because of the deteriorating health of the strikers, just as in 1909, forcible feeding of hungers striking suffragettes was justified as “ordinary hospital treatment” to save the women’s lives. Let us hope that this slide back into the bad old days does not go that far.

Let us also hope that they do not have to wait as long as we have for the genetic decoding of the tea plant before human ingenuity discovers a way of improving not just the quality and price of the comodity, but the quality of life of the women who tend and pluck it.

Like Marion Wallace, Gomathy, Kasualya and Rajeswary could each say her hunger strike was “a matter of principle, not only for my own sake but for the sake of others who may come after me” (Guardian). Let us hope that the daughters of these courageous women never have to suffer the indignities that their mothers have gone through, and that they can live and work in dignity and with the respect that any of us would expect for ourselves and our children in the 21st century.

“One of the biggest obstacles to tackling modern slavery is that it’s often hiding in plain sight” says the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and, as part of its 50 For Freedom campaign, has shared 10 ways to spot modern slavery.

Every one of these situations is experienced to a greater or lesser extent by India’s tea plantation workers. Yet, because their predicament began decades ago they are not usually considered to be victims of “modern slavery”. Which means they are not eligible for rescue and redress.

Is that fair? Judge for yourself. And, if you drink the tea they produce, you could help free them from slavery.

1. THEY’VE BEEN TRICKED

ILO: “Many victims of modern slavery are deceived into accepting what sound like good opportunities at first, but turn out to be lies.”

Gwyn Campbell writes (1): “A common occurrence, noted here in relation to Indo-China, the Bruma-Thai border, Arabia, Persia, India, Indonesia and Sulu, was that people sold themselves or their children in times of famine or other disaster. Slavery in such cases was sometimes justified as a form of ‘poor relief’…their condition differed from that of chattel slaves in that their families often accompanied them and laboured with them. They were also paid wages, although at a minimal rate. Most importantly, when their contracts ended they were free to leave the plantations. Thus, although planters often found ways to keep them, they were legally free.”

2. THEY’VE BEEN ISOLATED

ILO: “Victims can be isolated physically and forced to work in remote locations or simply prevented from communicating with friends, family or anyone else who speaks their own language.”

Keya Dasgupta (2) tells us that “… like slaves in the Americas, in both Mauritius and Assam, indentured labourers were uprooted from their homelands, settled in regions where they had no links with local people, and kept isolated on the plantations… a people uprooted from their own habitat, without any links with the surrounding community, would provide the ideal workforce for the exploitative mechanism of the plantation enterprise. ”

3. THEIR PASSPORTS HAVE BEEN TAKEN AWAY

ILO: “Confiscating passports or other important documents is a common means of coercing workers into accepting poor living and working conditions.”

Plantation labourers today are highly unlikely to have passports, and even less likely to have done so a hundred years ago. But as migrants from other areas, their lack of citizenship in their new home often causes conflict. Assam’s tea workers are descended from central Indian tribal communities, yet are ineligible for the state benefits of local tribals. The plight of Sri Lanka’s Tamil tea workers is another case in point “Although citizenship was finally granted to all stateless Persons of Indian Origin in 2003, most tea pickers in Sri Lanka still live without housing and land rights or access to basic services.” (New Internationalist – 2014)

4. THEY’RE WORKING OFF A DEBT

ILO: “Many victims of forced labour are trying to pay off a debt. It’s no ordinary debt though—as the victim has no power to negotiate the terms, which can change at the discretion of the “lender” and be passed down from generation to generation. This is called debt bondage and it’s especially common in Southern Asia.”

Dasgupta: “In the Brahmaputra valley of Assam, in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the plantation entrepreneurs, faced with a shortage of cheap and servile local workforce, took recourse to the immigration of thousands of labourers from economically depressed areas of the sub-continent. Through a system of legal compulsions initiated by the Colonial state, starting with the Workman’s Breach of Contract Act in 1859, they initiated the ‘indenture system’ of labour recruitment in the Brahmaputra Valley. This system, initiated for overseas migration of labour to the West Indies in the 1830s, was almost akin to slavery that preceded it, except that the workers were paid wages.”

5. THEY’RE PROMISED WAGES, BUT ARE NEVER PAID

ILO: “Irregular or late wages don’t always point to modern slavery. But when they’re deliberately withheld as a means of forcing workers to accept poor conditions or prevent them from changing jobs, it becomes a sign of forced labour.”

Even before India’s current demonetisation crisis, in which the withdrawal of Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 notes has led to a severe cash shortage impacting heavily on low paid labourers, tea workers faced endless delays in wage payments. “Staff of 242 tea gardens yet to receive wages” is a fairly typical headline. While I’m not aware of evidence that withholding wages is a deliberate tactic, the payment of minimal cash wages supplemented by tied housing, food rations etc seals tea workers’ dependency on their employers.

6. THEY WORK EXTREME HOURS, BUT DON’T EARN OVERTIME

ILO: “Extreme work hours seem like an obvious indicator of forced labour, but in practice, establishing whether that’s the case can be fairly complex. As a rule of thumb, if an employee is forced to work more overtime than national laws allow—and is under some kind of threat—it’s considered forced labour.”

Fairtrade certified estates commit to paying overtime, but in general tea pluckers are paid according to the weight of tea they pluck. When Munnar’s tea workers struck over wages and working hours and conditions in 2015, they won a slight increase in wages, but only on condition they plucked more tea.

The World Bank’s Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO) investigating a complaint about the International Finance Corporation (IFC)’s funding of Assam’s Amalgamated Plantations Private Limited found that “the IFC has not assured itself that the wages paid by the client are consistent with IFC’s commitment to support jobs which offer a ‘way out of poverty’ or ‘protect and promote the health’ of workers,”

7. THEY LIVE AND WORK IN ABUSIVE CONDITIONS

ILO: “A labour inspector in Brazil remembers finding workers in a fazenda, or plantation, housed in plastic shacks and drinking contaminated water… While not proof of forced labour on their own, poor working conditions are often red flag.”

Multiple reports testify to the poor housing, health, and occupational safety standards on Indian tea plantations – including most recently the 2016 CAO report, the 2014 Columbia Law School report and the BBC’s 2015 reports which claimed that “Living and working conditions are so bad, and wages so low, that tea workers and their families are left malnourished and vulnerable to fatal illnesses… There was also a disregard for health and safety, with workers spraying chemicals without protection, and on some estates, child labour being used.”

8, 9, 10 INTIMIDATION, TRAPPING & VIOLENCE

8. THEY’VE BEEN THREATENED OR INTIMIDATED (ILO: “Threats and intimidation are a staple of modern slavery, typically exploiting the vulnerability of a person who’s already in a weaker position.”), 9. THEY’RE PHYSICALLY TRAPPED (ILO: “Kidnapping people for exploitation or keeping them locked up is a clear sign of forced labour.”) and 10. THEY’VE BEEN BEATEN OR RAPED (ILO: “Physical violence is, tragically, a common feature of modern slavery. It can be used to exert control over victims or force them into performing tasks they didn’t agree to…”)

The Indian tea industry is “Rooted In The Abuse And Torture Of Labourers” according to the Huffington Post. Alan McFarlane in “Green Gold – the empire of tea ” writes of labourers in the 19th century (the forebears of current labourers) being shipped in to Assam from central India in conditions strongly reminiscent of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The power imbalance between plantation workers and managers remains almost as stark as it was in colonial times, as this story from the CAO report demonstrates; “[The police] take calls only from management, not from us,” said a worker at Batabari, describing his unsuccessful efforts to file a complaint after he had been severely beaten by an assistant manager in 2009.”

In addition to anecdotal evidence of sexual harassment of female tea pluckers by their male supervises, the FIAN fact-finding mission found evidence of “structural violence against women” who are therefore often “victims of gender-based violence”.

HELP FREE THEM FROM SLAVERY

The first step to freeing someone from slavery is acknowledging that they are in slavery. If you believe that Indian tea workers are indeed victims of modern slavery, you can challenge your favourite tea provider to take action. If you’re in the UK, you can cite the UK’s Modern Slavery Act, which requires UK companies to report on modern slavery in their global supply chains.

(1) Gwyn Campbell, ‘Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia’
(2)) Keya Dasgupta, ‘The coming of tea in the Brahmapura Valley’.